While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, March 20
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Six-year-old Fadi al-Zant is one of many children in Gaza suffering from acute malnutrition, amid a shortage of food and medicine in the war-torn enclave.
PHOTO: REUTERS
In Gaza, starving children fill hospital wards as famine looms
Six-year-old Fadi al-Zant is acutely malnourished, his ribs protruding under leathery skin, his eyes sunken as he lays in bed at the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, where famine is bearing down. His spindly legs can no longer support him enough to walk.
Photographs of Fadi from before the war show a smiling, healthy-looking child, standing in blue denims next to his taller twin with his hair brushed. A short video clip shows him dancing at a wedding with a little girl.
Fadi suffers from cystic fibrosis. Before the conflict, he was taking medicine that his family can no longer find and eating a carefully balanced variety of food no longer available in the Palestinian enclave, according to his mother Shimaa al-Zant.
The Kamal Adwan hospital, caring for Fadi, also treated most of the 27 children the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says have died of malnutrition and dehydration in recent weeks.
Second photo involving Kate was digitally altered, Reuters says
via REUTERS
A second royal photograph issued to the media by Kensington Palace, the office of Prince William and his wife Kate, was digitally altered in eight places, Reuters said on March 19, after an analysis of the picture by the news organisation’s photo editors.
The picture, released in April 2023 to mark what would have been the 97th birthday of the late Queen Elizabeth, showed the former monarch surrounded by some of her grandchildren and great grandchildren.
It had been taken by Kate, 42, at the Scottish royal residence Balmoral Castle the previous summer, Kensington Palace said at the time.
Ex-Trump aide reports to prison to serve contempt sentence
Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s former White House trade adviser, reported to a Florida prison on March 19 to begin serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.
Navarro, 74, is the highest-ranking former member of the Trump administration to spend time behind bars for actions stemming from the former Republican president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Navarro was found guilty of two counts of contempt in September for refusing to comply with a subpoena to testify before the congressional panel that investigated the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.
No Russian, Belarusian athletes in opening ceremony
REUTERS
Olympic chiefs announced on March 19 that Russian and Belarusian athletes competing in this summer’s Paris Games under a neutral flag will not be able to take part in the opening ceremony.
Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) from either country “will not participate in the parade of delegations and teams during the opening ceremony since they are individual athletes”, IOC director James Macleod said, after an executive board meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne.
“But an opportunity will be provided to them to experience the event,” added Macleod.
Sabalenka’s boyfriend’s death ‘apparent suicide’, say police
AFP
The death of former NHL ice hockey player Konstantin Koltsov, the boyfriend of tennis star Aryna Sabalenka is being treated as an “apparent suicide”, Miami-Dade Police said on March 19.
Police spokesman Argemis Colome said in an email that on March 18 at 12.39am (12.39pm Singapore time) police “were dispatched to the St Regis Bal Harbour Resort, in reference to a male that jumped from a balcony”.
“The Miami-Dade Police Department, Homicide Bureau, responded and has taken over the investigation of the apparent suicide of Mr Konstantin Koltsov. No foul play is suspected,” he added.
